How The Need To Feel Right Can Ruin A Relationship
In this society, there is a want to be right. There is a want to be seen as superior or knowledgeable. In a relationship, we want to feel good. A relationship can open our mind to other thoughts, help us feel supported and give us someone to spend time with. So, how does the want to be right impact a relationship?
People want to feel good about themselves, but someone’s ego can try pushing ideas and thoughts onto other people to make themselves feel superior and to give themselves a feeling of a status boost. This need to be “right” can overtake someone’s enjoyment of life and people around this person can also be pushed away. Loneliness can set in.
A partner in a relationship can be pushed away and feel inferior to someone that insists on always being right or correct. The protection of the ego itself can be so strong that understanding cannot begin to happen if someone insists on their own points of view and ideas that may be pushed onto the other person in a relationship. It may be so strong that the other person ends up leaving due to not feeling equal and valued in the partnership.
What is “being right”? Sometimes you can be as right as you want and insist on your own knowledge, opinions and ideas to be correct, but then have no friends or reach the goal that you originally wanted to get to. Perspectives are many. Knowledge abounds. In being humble and knowing that we experience life in different ways with different perspectives, we grow and learn.
Ask more questions about your partner. Get to know why he or she feels a certain way. Understand what it is that he or she has experienced that underlies their ideas and thoughts. It is okay to have disagreements and to have different viewpoints. Just because you are together in a relationship, it doesn’t mean that you have to always have the same ideas, thoughts and beliefs about life. Come up with agreements and logistically work out your daily life so that it is easier and more fun to manage. Be open to new experiences and ideas. You don’t have to agree with everything, but just listening to what someone else has to say is therapeutic and opens that door to further understanding.
Sometimes your own emotions can be so strong that they can get in the way of reason and logic. You may have anger or hurt feelings come up unexpectedly. It may overtake your mind and block you from acceptance of another opinion or the other side in your partnership.
Remembering what we ultimately want in a relationship will help us to get there. Focusing on developing the relationship and being whole within ourselves will give us a sense of peace. We can change. The other person can change. Allowing growth and change to occur is necessary for betterment. If we always stayed the same, had the same knowledge and limited ourselves, we would never get better or empower ourselves to do better.
When we feel our emotions overtaking us, we need to understand why and where it is coming from. We may have not felt resolution in certain situations. The importance about ourselves may be lacking and that is why we persistently have a need to feed our ego and seek for this need to be “right.” Trauma may have deeply affected us and thrown us into this place where we need to feel in control and more important that others (and our significant other). Life is flow and not a constant.
